Hail Mary, full of grace …

When people ask me to describe our church, I love to say, rather than being a non-denomination community church, we are a multi-denominational church! We come from so many different faith backgrounds. It makes for a very rich experience!

I grew up conservative Pentecostal – and God fit very neatly in a tidy, well-wrapped, little box for me and the church I attended. If you questioned God or the status quo, it was cause for suspicion. In fact, we were taught we were going to heaven and many other Christian denominations needed to be “saved.”

I like the fact that in this church, we can question, we can wonder and we don’t even need to have all the answers. No one has all the answers. We are all on a spiritual journey seeking an authentic relationship with a loving God.

When I was growing up, I was told to pray for my Catholic friends because they prayed to Mary.

Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches have a high devotion to the Virgin Mary. They call it “Mariology.” They say they “venerate” Mary, they don’t worship her; but still, many churches say it’s more like Mariolatry; that is, it looks like they worship her as God when they should be worshipping Jesus and the God we know in and through Jesus.

Here comes the beauty of our church. When I would make hospital calls to people when I was a new pastor in Colorado Springs, I decided to learn the rosary. Why? In my visits to folk raised in the Catholic faith, it was a connection to God. And throughout the years this has proved a great comfort when I’m praying with someone raised in this tradition. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”

I think many Protestants are in some ways spiritually impoverished by their total rejection of Mary as a figure of the faith. There are important things that we can learn from the Biblical accounts of Mary.

I believe that it’s appropriate in this Advent season to learn from the stories about Mary in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. There aren’t very many of those stories. Only Matthew and Luke have any stories about Jesus’ birth at all, and those Gospel accounts contain only a few passages that deal with Mary.

I’m going to say something, and I hope I don’t offend you. Christianity is so spiritually impoverished by its one-sided maleness that I think it will do us good to take a look at a few of these passages; to look and see what the woman, Mary of Nazareth, has to say to us.

The Christian tradition calls “The Annunciation,” the announcement by an angel from God that Mary will bear a child who is to be the Son of God and it is a good place to start. In the Gospel of Matthew, Mary is mentioned briefly, and only once.

The striking thing about this passage is that although it mentions Mary, it really isn’t about Mary at all. It’s about Joseph.

The only thing Matthew says about Mary is that “she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.” Matthew then switches his attention immediately from Mary to Joseph and the problem his miraculously pregnant fiancée creates for him. Matthew says he was going to send her away, presumably because at first he thought she had gotten pregnant through an act of infidelity with another man, but then comes what amounts to the Annunciation in Matthew’s account.

Here, however, the Annunciation, the heavenly announcement that Mary would bear a divine child, comes not to Mary but to Joseph. Here it is not Mary, but Joseph who does as the angel asks when he decides to marry Mary after all.

In Matthew’s version of the story, Mary is nearly absent. She has no voice. She is not consulted. She is given no choice. Matthew’s Mary has nothing to teach us because she is invisible. Matthew’s version of the Annunciation is a pure reflection of the sexism, the patriarchy and the male-centeredness, of both the Jewish culture and the Greek culture of the first century CE.

Now, compare that Mary to what we see in Luke’s story of The Annunciation. In Matthew, Mary is invisible. In Luke, she’s the main character in the story. Here, the archangel Gabriel comes not to Joseph, but to Mary, and he comes before Jesus’ miraculous conception, not after it as in Matthew.

As Luke tells the story, Gabriel’s words to Mary sound like a declaration, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son.” Yet when we read the whole story, could it not be possible that Gabriel is making a request to Mary, or perhaps, an offer to Mary, not issuing a command to her. After all, Luke ends his Annunciation story with Mary giving her consent: “Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of God; let it be with me according to your word.’” Mary’s consent wouldn’t be required if Gabriel’s’ words were a command rather than a request. (Something to think about.)

What a contrast to Matthew’s silent, invisible Mary! Right from the beginning we see that Mary is not a passive object as in Matthew, but an active character in the story. When Gabriel greets her she has a very human reaction. She was “much perplexed and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” She doesn’t run to ask Joseph about it. This Mary does her own thinking and her own discerning. This Mary has moral autonomy in her own right. She makes her own decisions. She has the autonomy, the freedom, to say no, even to God. She asks questions: “How can this be?” And in the end she says, “Yes, let it be with me as you say.” This Mary is a woman, a fully equal, fully autonomous human being. Yes! Go, Mary!

And that “yes” of Mary’s is very interesting. The Christian tradition has typically used it to portray Mary as meek and mild, faithful and obedient, submissive even to the will of God – and the Christian tradition has, until very recently, seen God almost exclusively as male. So Mary becomes a symbol of the submission of women to men.

According to theologian, Rev. Tom Sorenson, Mary’s “yes” to Gabriel’s proposal is at least ambiguous. The traditional understanding of it as showing a meek and obedient spirit is certainly one way to read it. Interpreted this way, Mary becomes a model of faithful obedience and compliance. But isn’t there also another way to look at Mary’s yes? Consider this: Gabriel has just laid on her a whole lot of information about who this child she is being asked to bear would be. “He will be great, the Son of the Most High, the ruler over Israel forever. He will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God.”

Could it be possible that Mary thought: “Wow! If this child is going to be all that, what an opportunity to be part of something great! Sure, I’ll face some ridicule and scorn as an unwed mother, but what a trade off! I’m all over this! Let’s do it!”

Now, that view of Mary is so different from how many of us have been taught to see her that it may be a bit hard to take. Fair enough, but the point remains. Even without that progressive interpretation, in Luke’s story of the Annunciation we have a picture of a woman that was absolutely revolutionary for the time and place in and for which it was written.

In his Mary, Luke gives us a picture of liberated womanhood. In Luke’s Mary, we see woman in her full, equal, God-given personhood. She stands in sharp contrast to Matthew’s invisible Mary, to whom something profound has happened but where she has no voice. Luke’s Mary throws down the gauntlet to the sexism of Luke’s day, and of ours, and says I am a person, a fully equal person capable of thought and insight, fully able to do my own discernment and make my own decisions.

And so it is especially ironic and, many would say, unfortunate that the Christian tradition has turned her into gentle Mary, meek and mild; into the model of woman subordinate to man whose only role is to consent.

Some Christian traditions have further deprived her of her full humanity by making her “ever virgin,” saying that she remained a virgin throughout her life, thereby denying the God-given goodness of female sexuality. Our tradition has made her a model of what many dominant men want women to be –compliant, obedient and non-threatening.

Today, I ask you to see her differently. I ask you to see her as a woman liberated, self-confident, self-assertive and self-sufficient … capable of her own moral decision making. Woman, as God created women to be.

That Mary, the Mary of Luke’s Annunciation story freed from its patriarchal interpretation, is a Mary worthy of her son, worthy of her traditional title of Mother of God and worthy of the God who created her. That is a Mary we can all admire and learn from. Amen.

PS: You are invited to our Christmas Eve candlelight services at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. I hope to see you!

Rev. Dan Koeshall is the senior pastor at The Metropolitan Community Church (The Met), 2633 Denver Street, San Diego, California, themetchurch.org. Services every Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m.